Concurrent missions in KSP2?

[Pthigrivi]

Acknowledging that this board tends to skew toward more experience players I wanted to get a sense of how many players fly more than one mission at once. By 'mission' I mean in-transit vessels to another moon or planet excluding things like stations and satellites and bases (unless they're en-route) that tend to stay put once in place. I always have run a lot at once, personally, but I know a lot of other people play more sequentially, and like to see each mission all the way to its conclusion before starting another. My suspicion is that because there will be colonies and stations to establish and support more players will have more simultaneous in-transit traffic than they do in KSP1 and will be less inclined to run one-off flags and footprints missions from Kerbin all the way to your destination without switching vessels. But maybe people are resistant to that? In either case it probably has implications for how resources are managed and how UI support works with things like alarm clocks and mission plans appended to vessels, etc. 

Thoughts? 

[darthgently]

28 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I wanted to get a sense of how many players fly more than one mission at once

If I have more than a game time day to wait until something "happens", I will work on another mission.   I've had well more than 10 missions going at a time.  And yes, it has led to confusion on both my part (missed burns mostly), and KSP's part (created maneuvernodes evaporated after returning to craft after much game time interval etc)

Edited April 14, 2022 by darthgently

[t_v]

I tend to not care if in game time goes up a lot, so I’ll not work on anything until a transfer is complete, unless it is a long transfer (like to Jool) in which case I’ll build stuff to launch in intermediary transfer windows. With the extremely long transfers of interstellar travel, I’ll probably have one or two interstellar craft going while I do regular stuff. 

[SciMan]

Due to the need to reduce part count in KSP 1, I tend to send "a mission" to another planet as a series of purpose-built craft, rather than as one gigantic vessel. Because of that, I can have quite a few vessels on transit trajectories between SOI's at any given time.

Before I installed Kerbal Alarm Clock (and the functionality later became incorporated in the stock game), I still attempted to do this to some degree.

In any case, my usual mission to another planet consists of usually 3 separate vessels:

The main mothership with its drive system unit and long main truss, which will have science lab functionality, with a docked-but-separately-launched lander that is capable of hopping from biome to biome on the surface,
The ISRU vessel (which doubles as a fuel tanker, I move fuel around, not Ore), docked to another drive system unit and capable of refueling the drive system, the science lander, and any other consumable needs of the mission like monopropellant (I don't play with life support mods),
And a third drive system unit that pushes all the "little satellites" that both make it possible to keep in radio contact with Kerbin (3 tiny relays per celestial body, plus 1 or 2 "main uplink" much larger relay satellites), and the satellite that scans for resource patches around whichever planet I plan on landing the ISRU vessel on.

If I ever attempt an Eve landing and return, there will be a 4th vessel, consisting of the Eve Ascent vehicle, and an electric-prop Eve Flier for biome hopping.

Jool also requires so many communications satellites that I tend to send the communications satellites and the resource scanner satellite separately on 2 drive systems.

With the way the launch windows work, and depending on when I get bored of playing KSP this time around, I could have 4 to 10+ of these vessels traveling around the solar system at any one time.

[whatsEJstandfor]

I don't really mess with mods so I didn't use Alarm Clock until it was incorporated into vanilla KSP, but I went from doing one or two missions at a time to doing 4 or 5 because of it. I can only imagine KSP 2 will have even more sophisticated mission tracking, so I'd anticipate that to go up

[Pthigrivi]

So this is all encouraging. Im glad to see stock alarm clock has changed things for a lot of folks, I seem to recall a similar poll a few years ago almost half of players were typically running one mission at a time (not that thats a bad way to play, just that KSP2 might incline more with colonies and interstellar and all). And I totally agree with others without KAC and other tools it's really easy to miss planned burns. They've also hinted at a system for mission planning right there in the VAB, and it would cool if these mission plans could be attached to vessels or even sub assemblies and edited over time even after launch. Sometimes when I build really elaborate missions and then they arrive 3 in-game years later at Jool I cant remember where everything is even supposed to go. 

Certainly as others have said I think many players aren't going to warp their interplanetary vessel all the way to Debdeb or beyond in one go. It does make me wonder though will there be some kind of time-cutoff for how long an interstellar mission can take? And how would that work? If vessel mass is all that mattered you could under-build and time warp overnight for a 100 years. So is there a reason to make faster ships besides avoiding ludicrous warp durations? 

This leads me back to the age old LS question because the idea of it worries some people, especially when you've got long warps and lots of simultaneous vessels. Even if LS is abstracted away somehow and doesn't deplete as its own resource do these vessels need continuous power? Perhaps having sufficient reactor fuel for the journey is a constraint? 

Edited April 15, 2022 by Pthigrivi